The Faces of Beyond

Photos: Courtesy of Sony

The uncanny valley is a weird place. It’s also really wide. While many engineers and artists have tried to build flawless doppelgè4ngers, their creations that look human without being human still provoke unease. But videogame designer David Cage keeps trying to beat the valley anyway. And with October’s Beyond: Two Souls, he’s taking his biggest step yet. The founder of French studio Quantic Dream, Cage has long sought to suffuse games with feelings. “Emotions are natural in a film or a novel,” he says. “Why can’t we can’t find them in games?” He began his quest in earnest with 2005’s Indigo Prophecy, which depicted as many quiet moments as it did set pieces. In 2010, Heavy Rain used motion-capture to create characters so detailed you could track their eye movements. For Beyond, about a young psychic girl, Quantic Dream simultaneously captured vocal and physical performances from leads Ellen Page and Willem Dafoe (above) and more than 150 others. The result: near-perfect digitized replicas. While Cage claims to be ready to forgo photorealism ,his larger aspiration hasn’t changed. “I dream of games that change who you are,” he says. Less Battlefield, more Bergman? Sign us up.

The cast of Beyond didn’t just voice-act — they filmed the game like a movie.